Sing! Karaoke by Smule

Prerna Gupta is an author and futurist. She previously served as the Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Smule, where she remains an advisor to the Board of Directors. This post originally appeared on the Clarity.fm blog....

The debut of Apple's new 64-bit A7 Application Processor has been assailed by more than one industry figure insisting that the new chip isn't anything special, but a series of iOS developers are reporting huge performance gains and already using the new chip to accomplish "desktop class" tasks that were not previously possible on a mobile device.

Well what do you know? It's Friday so we're smacking you in the face with a bag full of the week's best iPhone apps. You can track your heart rate, track your vacation, or just track the closest donut shop, and much more. Uncle Slam: Remember that MTV show Celebrity Death match where claymation famous people would battle each other in hilariously violent bouts? This is kind of like that except you can pit your favorite presidents against one another, and with an awesome name. John Adams v. John Quincy...

Executives at Smule, the startup that turns mobile devices into musical instruments with apps like Ocarina and Magic Piano, say the company’s apps are about to get social in a big way. Sharing has always been a key part of Smule’s products, but Prerna Gupta (who joined the company through the acquisition of another music app-maker called Khush, where she was CEO) says Smule hasn’t gone far enough — the cool musical stuff gets built first, then the social layer is “tacked on at the end.” That’s going to ...